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An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from PSGroove.com:
"Graf_chokolo, who has contributed countless things to the PS3 scene, had his private home raided by police this morning. They confiscated all of his 'accounts' and anything related to PS3 hacking. Some of you may remember that graf_chokolo promised if he was pushed, that he would release all of his PS3 hypervisor knowledge to the world. He kept good on this promise, releasing what is being dubbed as the Hypervisor Bible. 'The uploaded files contains his database, which is a series of tools for the PS3's Hypervisor and Hypervisor processes. It will help other devs to reverse engineer the hypervisor of PS3 further.'"

I'm okay with that. Still that doesn't mean I should be arrested for modding MY console. If Sony ever tries, and my life is ruined because of it (like what RIAA did to Jammie Thomas and other victims), the CEO might as well consider himself equivalent to Mubarak (i.e. a liberty-suppressing tyrant).

Oh and I'm not sure why people think I'm "trolling" or anti-sony??? The PS1 and 2 were my favorite consoles. 10 years of great gameplaying (1995-2005) so I'm hardly anti-sony.

> The PS1 and 2 were my favorite consoles. 10 years of great gameplaying (1995-2005) so I'm hardly anti-sony.

How many games did you buy?

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I still have my modded PlayStation (original).

I've purchased over 200 games for it over the years (Many games were imports -- which required the mod-chip.)

Because it is modded, I can play burned PS1 games. I keep all of the original discs in pristine condition by only playing the backups. I've never pirated a game for the PS1, even though it would be easy to do (I like having the packaging & book -- Lunar came with a hardback book & cloth map (which I framed

What's amazing to me is the different way that the police forces are treating these hardware tinkerers with Sony itself, which instigated and distributed a massive campaign of installing rootkits on people's computers. Utterly illegal, and yet the Sony CEO or whoever didn't get his door battered in at 6am.

One law for the serfs and a different, more lenient set of 'rules' for the our lords and masters.

Companies like Sony have no choice but to do whatever they can in order to make money for their shareholders, that is their only duty in the capitalist system we live in. If they think they can make more money by being nice they will, but if they can make more money by being bastards as is usually the case then they have to do that instead.

How many times have I seen this bullshit apology for corporate behavior on Slashdot? This "profit can justify any behavior" is a cancer that will let to the downfall of our society. Ethics have no place in the modern economy and we all suffer for it.

This is why corporate "personhood", the product of nine senile delinquents in black robes, is such a fucking stupid idea.

Corporations aren't people. They may have people as employees or stockholders, but in the end you cannot imprison a corporation. You cannot "fine" a corporation in any sense that matters since those at the top will just fuck over the workers to make up the profit. You cannot expect moral behavior out of a corporation because the fatass pillage-o-crats at the top make their decisions secur

Companies like Sony have no choice but to do whatever they can in order to make money for their shareholders, that is their only duty in the capitalist system we live in. If they think they can make more money by being nice they will, but if they can make more money by being bastards as is usually the case then they have to do that instead.

That's not how it works.

One of the effects of unethical behavior is that people start to not like you, and protest your actions. This costs you money, and is part of the capitalist system you are saying we should be forgiving them because of - instead, we should be embracing that capitalist system, and making sure that they lose money every time they do something stupid, unethical, or just plain evil. Occupy their time, give them bad press so that people stop buying their products, and every time you do so, make absolutely sure that the reason they are losing money is clear - if the dog craps on the carpet, you don't just sigh and whine to politicians - you rub their nose in it and tell them BAD DOG! And when a corporation misbehaves and pisses on all of their customers, they need to have their noses rubbed in it and be told BAD COMPANY!.

That "duty to the shareholders" you talk about? If unethical behavior actually resulted in losses, then duty to the shareholders would prevent it. People like you who whine "Don't hate the evil company for being evil! Hate the politicians who let them!" are just encouraging them, the same way that petting the dog and ignoring what it has done wrong every time it craps on your carpet encourages it to keep crapping on your carpet.

First of all, nobody is free to use their console as they please, until we have the freedom to remove, disable, or bypass Sony's restriction systems. That is why jailbreaking is so important; right now, the legality of jailbreaking and jailbreaking devices is in limbo.

That being said, fine, Sony can refuse me PSN services. I never wanted PSN services, I just wanted to use my PS3 without Sony's annoying and pointless (from the user's perspective) hypervisor.

So how does that work if I buy a book? If I rip a few pages and let everyone know that by ripping pages 12 and 15 the book is much more entertaining have I done anything wrong? If I start describing the plot of a movie and give an opinion as to how that plot could have been better, have I done anything wrong?

I understand that if I start bypassing online security then I am trying to bypass something that doesn't belong to me. That, in my opinion, is wrong.

On the other hand, there are books and magazines that explain how to open locks and safe. These are perfectly legal, educational and sometimes useful. If I am not attempting to open your lock then I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.

I doubt anyone really hates you, but surely it's true that if you didn't spend so much time trolling and and making up stories people might not call you names so often. Parent post is a classic example -- substituting the "N" word for "troll" and trying to shame and blame over it. That was truly idiotic as well as totally dishonest.

Looks at Xbox... hmmm Microsoft. Nope.Looks at Wii..... hmmm Nintendo. Nope.I'm running out of options - wish Sega still made a console. I guess this is just like a US election; I have to hold my nose and pick the least-evil candidate. (closes eyes) Um, er, Nintendo it is.

Of the three major video game console makers, the console division of Microsoft is the least evil. Xbox 360 is the only console with a developer program open to the public. Otherwise, you could always put a slim PC by your TV, hook up the HDMI, and game that way.

I'm running out of options - wish Sega still made a console.

Sega and Nintendo worked together on the Triforce arcade console. Xbox 360 builds on Sega's and Microsoft's experience with getting a Windows API running on Dreamcast.

Of the three major video game console makers, the console division of Microsoft is the least evil.

It doesn't work that way. Microsoft's entertainment division is part of Microsoft just like Sony's is part of Sony. If they don't wish us to conflate the two they can unincorporate the divisions in question, and they can stop doing all they can to brand them as part of the same corporation. Consequently, Nintendo is the least evil games console manufacturer/distributor. (I do think they are bad guys at heart, too.)

Here's an idea: don't trade your freedom just to gain access to video games. Don't fall for the bait and switch. You can play games on your desktop, which as far as I know is not designed to restrict your use of it.

Fuck them all. Get a PC. Even running Linux (!) you can play so many games for so long, day after day, completely wasting every spare hour of your life. Medical technology will never advance the human lifespan long enough such that even Linux gaming (and c'mon, it's not like Linux is the gaming platform) can ever be exhausted by any one person, even if that person drops out of school and work completely and takes meth all the time so they never sleep. It is so ridiculous to whine about non-evil game platform unavailability when even the most meager non-evil platform has so much to waste your time on.;-) Fuck Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. The world is bigger than them.

The entire fiasco with people getting arrested for modifying their own property is due to the DMCA's circumvention clause. Because the DMCA casts doubt on basic ownership rights I think that the base law is flawed.

If I want to buy a cheap super-computer or mod my Xbox 360 into a media center that should be a given-right: I bought the hardware so go to hell without my Freedom to Tinker [freedom-to-tinker.com].

The DMCA is nullified by the higher law known as the Constitution: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." --- "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained [such as modification of one's property] by the people."

Only nine people in this country know what the Constitution really means. People thought a second successive copyright term extension was unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court of the United States said otherwise.

Only nine people in this country know what the Constitution really means.

No, only nine people are presently empowered to have the final say on what the Constitution really means. That's not even remotely the same thing. Over the generations those nine people change, and the collective interpretation of the Constitution changes with it. Even within the Supreme Court, there are plenty of disagreements about what it "really means" - hence the large number of 5:4 decisions.

And even then, I think there are many cases where they shit on the spirit of the constitution in order to push their agenda anyway (eg - I do not think the tax laws we now have are the same as the founding fathers intended)

Federal tax law might not be the best example of defecating on the Constitution's spirit. The Constitution was amended specifically to allow an income tax.

Guys, do not contact me anymore because SONY got me. They have all my stuff and accounts now, so be careful.

It was not a troll guys, it’s me, they really got me, it was a matter of time. So be careful now, i warned you.

Guys, SONY was today at my home with police and got all my stuff and accounts. So be careful from now on.

Guys, i don’t joke, it’s serious.And to prove it, i kept my word and uploaded all my HV reversing stuff.Upload it everywhere so SONY couldn’t remove it easily. Grab it guys, it contains lots of knowledge about HV and HV procs.

Here is my HV bible:...

"SONY was today at my home"? That's not how raids work. In the US, Sony had to go through some rather extensive legal action to be able to get a TRO on geohot, and now they've convinced the German police to raid some random hacker's house out of nowhere? He's also not even one of the more prominent people involved, and had very little to do both with the core hacks and with subsequent piracy tools - he mostly worked on his own on hypervisor reverse engineering and there's just about nothing they could charge him with. This would also be the first action taken by SCEE regarding this entire issue. And you'd expect someone other than graf_chokolo to notice, publish, or somehow independently report the raid. Not to mention that if you're raided, the first thing you do is talk to an attorney, not post a care package online (as "proof"?). None of this makes any sense.

He did mention that if he ever got a takedown notice from Sony or something along those lines, he'd release his hypervisor disassembler database. I think it's more likely that he got tired of waiting and just made up an excuse.

Depending on how they spun the story to police, a "raid" could range from anything to a civil subpoena to a SWAT-style assault with Sony "experts" tagging along to "assist" with evidence identification. Maybe Sony decided they wanted something a bit rougher than what they inflicted on George Hotz and made up some kind of uberhacker story?

Okay, to be fair, I just found out that Kotaku reports [kotaku.com] getting confirmation from SCEE. I don't exactly consider kotaku (or SCEE for that matter) to be completely infallible, but at least this beats blog comments.

Nonetheless, I still think this makes no sense, if it did actually take place. If it did, graf_chokolo's reaction is, to put it bluntly, stupid (at the very least, his database, which by its nature contains a full copy of the hypervisor, is copyright infringement if nothing else). Bad plan if you are in fact the target of legal action. He needs a lawyer ASAP.

Nonetheless, I still think this makes no sense, if it did actually take place. If it did, graf_chokolo's reaction is, to put it bluntly, stupid

Sega v. Accolade proved that you can reuse copyrighted strings when necessary to achieve compatibility. Fair Use law says that you can quote as much of a work as necessary to critique it. You're right that he needs a lawyer, but it's not clear that what he did was illegal... yet.

I can't pull up the article - web category blocked, so maybe this is explained in the article, but why are local police getting involved in these hacking cases? Shouldn't this be a job for federal investigators - ie, FBI or similar organization, depending on country? This isn't the first story I have seen like this. It seems to me that local police are overstepping the bounds of their jurisdiction in cases such as this. Just a thought.

I have to say, I am not impressed by this. At the end of the day, it is a CIVIL matter. From the look of that copper (an employee of the state!) bashing down the door, its the type of thing you see on police camera action.

I am going to find out which constabulary this is, and write a letter of complaint of the police using heavy handed tactics in non criminal matters. It's almost as though they are sony's personal army.

at least apple does not get the cops to bust some a** over Iphone and mac os x hacking.

No they only took the big guys to court over loading mac os x on a pc and even then over seas they will have a even harder time wining a case over the same thing and as for the iphone the dmca says you have the right to hack a phone.

Money must be involved somehow right?Police don't care about this kind of crap do they?When they pull someone over and see one of those CD holders on a person's visor they don't care that its all pirated music.... so how do they care about this PS3 stuff?

Does Sony make a huge donation to their department?Was it a court order?

Something may need to be done, but does that "something" preclude people from using a product that they purchased by busting down their door and stealing all their equipment?
Remember back in the old days when people would take things apart just to learn how they worked? Old toasters, microwaves, circuitry sets, etc. It really seems like we're forgetting that whole aspect of learning.

There is no evidence that the police "busted down" his door. I did a little googling after I read the previous comment that referred to that and discovered two things. First, the site linked in the summary is a site that doesn't actually go out and find news. They just report stories that they find that are of interest to their readers. Second, none of the other sites which reported on this story contained such a picture, and all of them talked very generically about the police raiding his house and seizing

+1, and in addition, what about the PS2 emulation that isn't? And what about the 60 meg original I have sitting around as a doorstop because I'm tired of paying Sony $150 to fix their faulty equipment then have it break again immediately?

You're a tool and a fool. Free toast? You're comparing some bits and bytes - imaginary, abstract nonsense, to real world, concrete possessions. For me to get some free toast, someone, somewhere had to grow some wheat (or other grain), someone had to grow some sugar, someone had to mill the flour, and refine the sugar, someone had to bake that bread - all real things, over which real people sweat, in order to produce a tangible product.
Those bits and bytes? Holy mother of God - I have an entire OPERATI

Probably because some of that lost revenue is from people who would have been customers.

[citation needed]

We all know that some pirates are displacing sales. We also know that some pirates are of the "try before you buy" type who go on to pay because they're socially responsible, and wouldn't have paid otherwise because they wouldn't lay out $50 for a game without trying it first. We know that some pirates will promote the game to their friends, who may buy it. Or make campaign maps or submit bug reports or do various other things that make the game more valuable to prospective customers, there

If you think the majority of people buy a console ever expecting "fair use" you're living in cloud cuckoo land. It is almost by definition a closed box, and Sony / Microsoft / Nintendo will do their damnedest to keep it that way.

That's the problem.

Though I doubt Sony would give a crap if someone produced firmware that turned their PS3 into a dedicated Linux box. What they do care about is people modifying their closed firmware to enable piracy, isoloaders, game hacks, PSN hacks, aimbots, trophy editors etc. etc.

I don't think you understand what I'm saying.

It isn't that aimbots and piracy are socially-beneficial things that must be preserved. It's that the measures required to eliminate them, first of all don't actually eliminate them, but more importantly the cure is worse than the disease. Shutting open systems out of popular culture just so we can stop some jackass from cheating at video games is too high a cost.

I don't agree with the way Sony is doing it, but at least they are doing something. Some of the multiplayer games are completely unplayable as cheating is rampant. Something needs to be done as they're ruining the games for honest players.

Server-side checks: You don't have to Like Blizzard's "got-to-be-online-to-play" for Starcraft II, but notice: no cheating, with 1000000+ connected users and a easy to hack platform (PC+Mac).

If your game uses p2p connections and no gameplay server, some care in designing the protocol will make it much harder to cheat. Deterministic sync'hing with input passing, for example, will provide you a no-cheating solution. There's many other options.

Problem with cheating is that about no one in the industry cares about quality. Don't go justifying Sony's action on gamer's cheating. Find something better.

They could also just require you to be logged into their service to play multiplayer; forcing people to be online for singleplayer is a retarded policy. Some of us are regularly in hotels and we don't always have a network connection (and if we do there's no guarantee the connection is any good), or your provider might have some big outage etc etc.

Forcing people to be online for an offline game or offline play is just a big no-no.

Forcing people to be online for an offline game or offline play is just a big no-no.

If it's a big no-no on the PLAYSTATION 3, then why isn't it a big no-no on the PC? With a few exceptions such as Trine, there aren't a lot of well-known PC games designed to be played multiplayer on one machine using two to four gamepads, even with the rise of LCD HDTVs that can be connected to a PC's video card through a VGA or HDMI cable.

You don't really understand the full nature of cheating. It's easy to stop some things, but if someone has a wall hack or aimbot, no amount of server side checks will distinguish that from a skilled player. That is, unless the server just precomputes all sound and graphics and sends them to the client, rather than telling the client exactly where sounds are to originate from, or where enemy player models are.

Then I retort simply -- how then can *you* tell the difference between an aimbotter/wallhacker and a skilled player? If it's not just an entirely subjective "he's too much better at it than I am", then shouldn't you be able to gauge some kind of metric to weed them out?

At the same time, shouldn't it be simple enough to publish an update to the game that includes some kind of anti-cheat code, rather than "I assume that the client is always right and completely honest at all times"? I thought "never trust t

You know, tests have been done with martial artists.... they demonstrated an interesting one in a show "Fight Science".

Very simple, you give a person a bunch of targets, with little LEDs, tell a subject to hit each target as the lights come on.

Compare the results of a trained, practiced martial artist against someone who isn't, and the results are striking. The martial artist was hitting the target BEFORE the normal persons limbs were even in motion!

Server-side checks: You don't have to Like Blizzard's "got-to-be-online-to-play" for Starcraft II, but notice: no cheating, with 1000000+ connected users and a easy to hack platform (PC+Mac).

And that appears to one prong of attack Sony are pursuing. Sony have put modders on notice they won't get into PSN most likely to stop griefers and other assholes exploiting bugs / behaviours not normally seen in the server and ruining the experience for normal players. I expect future games with substantial online components will have mandatory sign on requirements and feature stronger, punkbuster like checks during gameplay to stop modders too.

Those exploits have nothing to do with the hypervisor being compromised. They have been around long before these cracks and are the fault of the game developers.
You can fault Sony for not being more proactive in cracking down on such cheaters, but you can't blame these guys who are cracking the system wide open. Though obviously they're not helping on that front either.

If you found some really good info on cracking a bit of hardware, you had better create a pseudonym and set up a way to hide your tracks online before you release the stuff. Hide who you are, use open relays and proxies outside of the country, do uploads or connects only from public wifi points... You have to hide like a spy because the corporations control the police and government and can get the cops in full SWAT mode to bash down your door and hit you in the head with a rifle bu

That's all quite pragmatic, but the lesson that I took away from this story is that we MUST stop permitting our governments to stop acting on behalf of corporations, and FORCE them to act in the interests of the people, or else we will simply continue our slide into Fascism. If we examine history, fascism leads to stagnation in technical development which leads to military conquest... And not in the direction the fascism would like.

In retaliation, PS3 Hackers should make an effort to damage the PS3s market any way possible. And I'd imagine the best approaches will be:(1) improving the free PS3 emulators for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux,(2) making piracy of PS3 games more user friendly, say writing better howtos,(2) developing tools for cheating in-game, ala aimbots that're easily adapted to new games,(3) writing howto docs explaining how to create PS3 games without paying Sony's royalties, and(4) a howto for creating an inexpensive

Well, you're funding those idiots, but that's your right, and I won't judge you for it. However, its the attackers rights to take their kit apart and share the info as they see fit, and the cheaters right to try to game the system. Sony is the one who should be protecting *you* in a technical manner, and not by simply trampling over non-customers rights.

This is precisely the reason why hackers are despised right now by most PS3 owners.
I couldn't care less about them making emulators, games, knockoffs or even copies of games, installing linux, xbmc or using the console for other awesome stuff, but what I do care about is that my gaming experience is being affected by what they do. I am not Sony, nor am I fan of Sony. I choose the PS3 because I like to play games without hassle once in a while, and in my experience, Microsoft is by far the more evil company.

So, about retaliation:
(1) Fight the DMCA. This is the real problem, isn't it?
(2) Stop buying Sony products.
(3) Stop whining. You (american hackers) knew full well that this was illegal in your country and didn't give a shit about getting caught.

This is how society and the market works - if enough gamers are pissed that gaming on a PS3 is a waste of time due to cheaters, then Sony makes less money. If Sony makes less money, then they may look into stopping the cheaters via methods other than simply bludgeoning non-cheaters with the full force of civil law.

Oh no he told other people how to modify things they own. This could allow them to bypass DRM. The idiocy was making laws to protect DRM in my opinion if a copy right holder employs DRM they should loose all copyright protections since they are employing technical means they no longer need those copyright protections. Were effectively allowing corps to make nearly everybody with a brain a criminal. Personally I have a modded wii but own all the games I play, backup disks are a godsend for parents, same

The idiocy was making laws to protect DRM in my opinion if a copy right holder employs DRM they should loose all copyright protections since they are employing technical means they no longer need those copyright protections.

What you propose would be the opposite of the laws for physical theft, where the punishment is lowest if I take something away that is unprotected, worse if I break a lock, and worse again when I use force. Your argument says basically that if I try to steal your car, you defend it with a baseball bat and I shoot you, there should be no punishment.

The stupid thing is the double standard regarding this sort of thing. Books are released all the time that go into detail about how to hack various OSs, systems, platforms, etc, all under the guise of "prevention," and I don't see anyone kicking down the doors of those publishing companies or the book authors...

There is something very wrong with the legal system in this country...

>>>Something needs to be done as they're ruining the games for honest players.

I agree and banning modded consoles is the solution, NOT shipping people off to jail for 5 years. Sony's approach is extreme overkill for what is, basically, just a toy. It's akin to locking-up someone because they modded Optimus Prime with electronics to self-transform, and then shared the plans online. ("Oh no! Got to lock him up for modding our toy!" - Hasbro.)

Um, no it's not. While I agree with the first part of your statement, an Optimus Prime toy doesn't yet have a built in commerce engine, play 1000s of movies or provide additional revenue that Hasbro bases their financial projections on to remain a profitable company.

FTFY.
"Buy the new Optimus Prime EX Super Toy with up to 500 lines from the Transformers movies!

Base toy comes with five lines, additional lines sold separately, use of addon voice packs requires continuous connection to wireless network to validate content, see our website for more detail.

For Sony it's not really about cheating, it's about getting their royalty every time a game is sold. It's the same reason why "Other OS" wasn't allowed full access to the processing power of the PS3. If writing games in Linux had become a viable option on the PS3 then at least some companies would have considered distributing some of their content that way, saving themselves a huge margin. Incidentally cheating will always be an issue if your game's server trusts the client excessively anyway.

Um yeah, It's the 13 year old kiddies. Modern Warfare II multi player is unplayable on the xbox platform because the sniper rifle is horribly broken. and of course they wont release a patch to fix that, so they released Modern Warfare 2.25 called "black ops" to fix it, somewhat. I can still uttely own someone with my hacked controller and a pistol.

Yeah! Police should bust down a PS3 hacker's door! They should really be wasting their time to 'ensure' that no one cheats in a multiplayer game. After all, cheating is 'bad' because some people don't like it. Like repeatedly using a certain powerful weapon in a game!

Was it really necessary for the police to wear Riot gear and Bust down the door? Did they think this gamer was going to beat them with a ps3 controller??? I bet they shot his little dog too (standard operating procedure).

Jeez. All they needed to do was knock and say, "We have a warrant to search your home," like polite servants. - Stupid SA

The police don't determine whether you've done something illegal. The courts do. But I am on your side that whatever crime he's being accused of is clearly non-violent so having the police bash down the door is silly at best and probably quite dangerous for everyone involved.

The police did the right thing. This guy is obviously a gamer, which means he is an expert in all forms of combat, including multiple styles of hand-to-hand martial arts, every weapon under the sun, and black magic.

Uhhhh, do you REALLY think that was an actual photo of this particular raid, and not just some stock photo of a police raid? You really think they planned this raid, then brought in a photographer to do an artsy photo with a lensbaby, and then released that photo to the press?

If police are doing a raid they often do get a photographer from a newspaper to photograph it, usually for when they do anti-drug raids to discourage people from committing those crimes, lest their houses get raided too.